Sounds Around Town: Terry Kitchen makes his way to ‘The Quiet Places’

By Ed Symkus Correspondent

Wednesday

Apr 4, 2018 at 8:22 AMApr 4, 2018 at 8:53 PM

Singer-songwriter Terry Kitchen had lived all over the country - his native New Jersey, then Pennsylvania, Ohio, and California - before moving to Boston in the 1980s. Though the songs he’ll be playing at the Somerville Armory on April 7, as part of the next installment of Somerville Songwriter Sessions, fit comfortably under the umbrella of folk music, his choices of music to perform have been nearly as varied as his geographical ones.

Early on he was caught up in the excitement of the Beatles.

“I got a plastic guitar when I was in first grade,” he said, “and I tuned it to the first chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’”

A few years later he got a real guitar.

“I was in fifth grade. I formed a band called the Odyssey with two other kids from my Cub Scout pack,” he said. “We did our first gig at a Cub Scout meeting, and we played ‘Hey Jude’ and two songs that we wrote.”

During his summer camp days, he was strumming along to songs including “Where Have all the Flowers Gone” but also listening to plenty of Beatles tunes and watching “The Monkees.”

“So one idea was that you could do this and have girls scream for you,” he said, “and the other half was isn’t it nice to sit around the campfire and sing songs with people.”

Additional musical directions Kitchen followed were playing covers in a frat party band, introducing original pop-rock material in his Boston band Loose Ties, becoming fascinated with the bossa nova sound and, for the past couple of decades, going that singer-songwriter route.

Kitchen has already been doing gigs celebrating his new CD “The Quiet Places,” and he’ll be playing some selections from it at the Armory gig.

“Some of the songs on it are older,” said Kitchen from his home in Roslindale, “and there’s one that I didn’t write, a cover of Spirit’s ‘Nature’s Way.’ But most of them are within the past couple of years, since my last album.”

Asked to talk about where some of the songs might have sprung from, he brought up two: the disturbing “The Kid Behind the Wall,” which is about child abuse, and the happy, lilting “Half You Half Me,” the topic of which is misleading upon first listen.

“ ‘The Kid Behind the Wall’ goes back to when I was in college in Los Angeles,” he said. “I was living off campus with my girlfriend and we overheard this domestic shouting through an apartment wall. I was really young and I was thinking, ‘What do you do? Who do you call?’ It was a difficult situation, and was something I sort of tried not to think about for a number of years. But then I was thinking about it more recently, and finally that song came out.

“‘Half You Half Me’ came from when my wife and I were getting a new kitten. My wife is kind of fond of me; she tolerates me (laughs). But our kitten, Ro, adores me, more than any creature has ever adored me. The way the song is written it seems to be about a couple expecting a child. But it’s a cat. The lineage of her name would be Ensign Ro Laren, a character from ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’”.

Kitchen’s inclusion of ‘Nature’s Way’ follows his predilection for singing covers now and then. They’ve ranged from “Let It Be” to “This Diamond Ring,” from “I’m a Believer” to “In My Room.”

“First and foremost, it has to be a song that I love and love to sing,” he explained. “It’s good to let people have a window into your world. So you have a song that people might already know, and what you do with it is maybe a little window as to what makes you you as an artist.”

Kitchen hasn’t yet put together a set list for the Armory show, partly because he’s sharing the bill with two other performers, and he’s not sure what they have planned.

“I’m playing with Pat Wictor, who does politically oriented folk music, and with Avi Wisnia, who’s a kind of jazzy bossa nova guy,” he said. “We’ll each play a short solo set, maybe 20 or 25 minutes, and then in the second half all three of us will do an hour in the round. I know that in the first half, I’ll certainly be playing ‘Enjoy It While It Lasts’ from the new album. But I’m not sure about the second half, when we’re all onstage together trading songs. A lot of times you have a plan, but then the person just before you does a song, and you have to answer that, you have to respond to it with a song, so it becomes a little more spontaneous.”

Terry Kitchen, Pat Wictor, and Avi Wisnia perform in the Café at the Somerville Armory as part of the Somerville Songwriter Sessions on April 7 at 7:30 p.m. Donations are gratefully accepted. Info: 617-718-2191.